Reclaiming the mother

Last year I immersed myself in motherhood. Absolutely and completely. That’s not to say that I wasn’t already a mother, or that I didn’t give my everything to being a mum. It is just that for the first time I didn’t have anything else that was my own. With the welcoming of my first baby I was back at work the very next day. I was working for myself and constantly busy. My diary was full of dates and deadlines. My mind constantly switched on, always balancing and calculating how to fit everything in.

With the birth of my daughter, my second baby, I also had plans to continue with work after a few months of rest and adjustment. I had ideas, things I wanted to achieve. Or perhaps it was more that I thought I should be achieving those things.

However, slowly, everything fell away as time stripped me of all the things I believed I needed to do and be.

And left me only with the absolute essentials.

Looking after my babes. And me.

Everything ground to a halt and it was almost as if I had no choice but to get off the spinning wheel of busyness that I had been on, and felt I needed to be on, for most of my adult life. It felt strange and uncomfortable not having anything tangible and measurable to strive towards.

All that remained for me was an acceptance and allowance for space and rest. And it was a definite intentional allowance. Because as ironic as it might seem, even though we constantly seem to complain about the lack of time, of being tired, about doing things we don't want to do, we don't really know what to do with ourselves when we are without them. So strongly are they tied to our conditioning and identity it seems to be the work of a lifetime to unravel from them.

And as a part of this unraveling space and rest stood out as being the most important for me. Yet like a distant echo a truth remained that the time for achievement would come. But in a different way. What I needed now is to create a foundation, fertile ground, from which these ideas would sprout. And keeping them at a distance, staying in this space of allowing and unfolding rather than the grasping and controlling, which is what I have always known before, has been hard. But necessary. For my health, happiness and sanity.

And over time as I gave my self permission to lean into the uncomfortable-ness of it all, it became familiar and eventually easier.

One of the things which has arisen from it all is finally getting comfortable with the idea of being 'just' a mother. Or more so the realisation that previous to that I felt as if I had to be more in order to feel accepted and be deemed worthy by society's standards. There is much to be said for the many ways in which the role of mother is significantly compromised and undervalued in our current world. But there is freedom in finding your own value in it and reclaiming the feeling of enough. And now from what feels like a blanks slate after a year or releasing all the things I felt I needed to be for all the different reasons I kept telling myself, I can start to weave in the things that truly matter.